Oracle EBS R12, Install/Clone over Oracle/Red Hat Linux 7.x

As far I could recollect, Oracle EBS R12.0.x & R12 12.1.x are not certified yet for Linux 7, let it be Red Hat Linux or Oracle enterprise Linux. Does the certification path really make guys like us trying to clone, install EBS R12 over yet to be certified platforms? Well, my case, I always did attempt & succeeded to a certain levels. Starting with Oracle 10g over Windows 7, 8 etc.

Once the installation completed, you will notice that you have two new users created

oracle

applmgr

If your cloned instance was having different user names for both application and database, create same usernames and add them to relevant groups

for example applprod to oinstall group and oraprod to dba, oinstall groups (mandatory)

Special note: If you are attempting these hacks for Production instances, sorry buddy, YOU will never be supported by Oracle as they have recently confirmed to me through a private message that they don’t have any plans to certify 12.0.x versions on OEL 6 or 7

Prior you attempt to clone or install the 12.0.6 instance over OEL 6, 7 make sure that you have taken care of few things prior the attempt. There are few OS level files formatting mandatory for Oracle applications, those caused me almost 3 weeks of reading various blog posts, and NOT a single solution to address a weird error associated with “Error: Missing ormi[s]://<host>:<port>” error while shutting down the application services using adstpall.sh script file! And the reason was default formatting of /etc/hosts file by OEL 7 installation!

The /etc/hosts file must be formatted like below with your OEL/RHEL 7.x installation

Rest of the network related mandatory elements specified in the reference documents could be ignored, or you may format them as well. If you are going to touch your /etc/resolv.conf file at all, make sure that after changing the content of the resolv.conf, you make it read-only by issuing the following command

chattr +i resolv.conf

else after a reboot, this file be rewritten by the networking admin services

Now let us refer to the /etc/sysctl.conf & /etc/security/limits.conf files, which are setting system level parameters for the application. While I noticed that the previously configured parameters were causing performance degradation once after the clone, I just copied these elements from a 12.1.3 vision instance and replaced to find that, my cloned instance started flying, giving me much better performance than our Production instance that has the latest hardware and 48GB physical memory!

Once again, thoroughly check the below parameters, if something looks not appropriate for your environment, refrain from updating

Install unzip version 5 from https://oss.oracle.com/el4/unzip/unzip.html

(This is mandatory as 12.0.x doesn’t support unzip version above 5, and your cloning will fail with error notifying unzip is not supported)

Source the libdb.so.2 library file to /usr/lib from your source system, as the libgdbm.so.4.0.0 soft link hack will not work. If the libdb.so.2 is already a soft link in your source system, move the source file “libgdbm.so.2.0.0” from source to target box and create the soft link.

Now go ahead and enjoy the cloning/installation of your R12 12.0.x, or R12.1.x releases over OEL/RHEL 7.x (CENTOS is GNU release of RHEL, so you may experiment with that distro as well, nothing guaranteed though)

Please be warned, I have read many places that, many modules do not work with Linux 6,7 releases. Hence, the entire exercises you painfully executed may turn futile at later stages, and once again, if you have a live Oracle support, do not attempt such with your Production instance!